Besides, some argue that it's always the zealots who are at the forefront of a nascent movement -- they're the ones with the passion to organize. "It happened in early years of anti-Vietnam war movement," says Banks. "It took a long time before the media came to realize that opposition to the war was much more widespread than they imagined."

But Gitlin says the people behind Refuse & Resist and the IAC are more emblematic of the radicals who destroyed the antiwar movement than those who created it. "As war became less popular, so did the antiwar movement," he says. "People saw the antiwar movement as a squad of would-be revolutionaries who wanted to tear up everything orderly and promising about America, and they hated it. They didn't hate cops. They didn't want to turn the country upside down. They wanted to end a horrible war." He quotes John Lennon's line from the Beatles' "Revolution": "But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/ You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow." "Those people are trying to recruit more people to their banner," Gitlin says. "Other people who have other politics should be doing the equivalent, recruiting people to a banner that looks more like the American banner and doesn't appear to be a slap at patriotism."

After all, most of the people who filled Central Park came because they're scared of unleashing conflagrations across the globe -- not because they hate U.S. imperialism. "I think it's going to lead to World War III," said Leslie Baxter, a Manhattan mother of two, at the time. "I don't believe everyday Americans want this war to occur."

Another attendee, Eric Lazarus, a 41-year-old computer scientist, said he was motivated by "respect for international law. We live reasonably peacefully within the nation because we treat law seriously. The obvious next step is that we need to treat international law extremely seriously." Not quite a cry for worker revolution.

Which is, of course, what many speakers were calling for. "Strike! You must strike! Stop the machinery of war by refusing to work!" shrieked a self-described Wobbly. That's not to say there weren't plenty of sane voices. Martin Sheen read part of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech, while Tim Robbins cautioned his fellow activists, "This is not the chickens coming home to roost ... al-Qaida's actions have hurt this burgeoning peace movement more than any other." But there was enough lefty tired hyperbole -- activists insisting that the fate of the nation is inextricable from that of jailed Indian activist Leonard Peltier, or decrying the "global grab for a lockdown world of global capitalism" -- to exasperate all but the most diehard in attendance.

On that day, the disconnection between the politics of the organizers and the attendees didn't seem to matter much. Except when there was a celebrity on, only a few hundred people stood before the speakers -- everyone else milled about on the grass, had picnics, talked to each other, catching only fragments of the incendiary speeches. Still, Gitlin says the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist rhetoric emanating from the stage has already alienated some liberals who were ready to join a new antiwar movement. He's gotten letters from several people who went to the protest, "heard a bit of it and thought No, not only is this not my crowd, this is not my tone. And they fled."

Which is unfortunate, because if the antiwar movement is serious about trying to stop Bush's military juggernaut, it's going to need the silent masses of people who want a secure peace, not a revolution. After all, most Americans remain ambivalent about Bush's plans. A CBS/New York Times poll taken in early October shows that while 67 percent of Americans support a war to depose Saddam, the number drops to 54 percent if there are to be "substantial U.S. military casualties," and to 49 percent if the war would last "months or even years." This suggests that there's a large potential constituency in America for a movement opposing the war on the grounds that it would be costly, bloody and dangerous -- as opposed to simply immoral.

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